Wouldn't it have been more efficient to just call up the Lillie model instead of hiding a model of her on every map in the Gen VII games that has a cutscene with her? Same with the Gentlemen & Maid hidden in every Pokemon Center for the ORAS event with them for Diancie. Wouldn't it make sense for them to make a program that upscale a Pokemon's model and smooth out the texture instead of creating a model for every Dyanamax Pokemon?
GF's programming style is forceful, especially when it comes to models. Instead of using tricks many programmers use to make cleaner code (and may ultimately save them time), they just either place the model where they think they'll need it or create another of the model if any change was done to it so they wouldn't have to mess with how its rendered. And while admittedly for something like the cutscene characters being on the map is trivial as loading them in is no more of a hassle, something like having different models instead of just manipulating the one model is possibly now showing its effect on the games if that was a deciding factor in Dexit (with either the Dynamax models taking up more space than GF realized (and them not liking to compress their code either) and/or them not wanting to create an individual Dynamax model for every Pokemon nor create & test a program that does it for them).
This also made me come up to a sad realization that one of the great achievements Iwata is credited for, compressing Kanto in Gen II so that GF was able to put it into the games, wasn't as impressive as one may have thought because it's seeming more likely GF didn't compress anything. Iwata was still a great programmer for all his other feats (like coding in the Type Chart into Stadium without a source code to go off from), but this might be more of an instance where it was just GF's own programming incompetence of not doing something as obvious as compressing their code which may have made them cut one of the elements that made Gen II very memorable had Iwata not stepped in.
After some basic Google searching didn't find any articles online going into more detail. I found one Youtube video that explains a bit more but that's about it:
However there is evidence that GF still didn't handpick the color palette but was simply letting the game choose the next color palette in the code. Many Pokemon who share similar colors have their Shinies also share similar colors (like how many blue Water-type Pokemon have a purple-pink Shiny or orange Pokemon's Shiny are yellowish). Also, if the shiny Pokemon were handmade, why do so many only slightly change in color? If you were making a Shiny wouldn't you pick a color that's strikingly different from the original?
Infact, the video above implies they stopped doing it not because they suddenly decided to make more interesting looking Shinies but because model textures work differently from sprite color palettes (and that GF didn't want to palette swap textures but instead make a whole different model); had we kept with sprites they may have kept this old way of doing Shinies!
